7 ms·

Running Lisp in Production (2015)

167 points by wglb 7y ago

gilesgate 7y ago
Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course, C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.
- msla 7y ago
  APL is the ITS of the programming world: Both are immensely powerful and quirky, and were designed by people with a real allergy to typing. It would be nice if there were an Open Source APL which was the equivalent of SBCL in terms of being the default and feature-complete implementation; it would also be nice if APL were elegant as opposed to merely terse.
- Throw_Away_4825 7y ago
  >(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure What? It gets exposure on the Internet all the time, while seemingly nearly no one uses it in production. Edit: Just look at the end of [1]. They have exactly three examples. Edit 2: They have more example in [2], but it is still pretty little. [1] https://lisp-lang.org/ https://lisp-lang.org/ [2] https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    This is getting downvoted and I don't see why. CL is easily in the top 10 programming languages I see mentioned on HN and it also comes up regularly outside of HN, yet the amount of people actually using it in production seems miniscule.
    - Throw_Away_7435 7y ago
      Because HN is full of Lisp zealots. (Which may be partially because Paul Graham is also a Lisp zealot.) And there is of course also a selection of people who click on certain threads. Many other platforms are similar in that regard, but from HN I would normally except better. (I am the same person as grand-parent with a different account, btw.)
      - tomhoward 7y ago
        HN being one of the few places online where Lisp enthusiasts can find new Lisp-related content and discuss it with other enthusiasts is very different from HN being "full of Lisp zealots" They're still very much in the minority here.
- dang 7y ago
  Also 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944
- jammygit 7y ago
  I did not realize common lisp was still in use and was therefore planning on learning Clojure instead. Which is better to learn then?
  - eschaton 7y ago
    What made you think it was “no longer in use?” It’s a very big world. Just because something isn’t mentioned regularly in headlines doesn’t mean it’s not out there.
  - billsix 7y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
    - gilesgate 7y ago
      "On Lisp" is a good book but perhaps too advanced for an introduction, whereas his "ANSI Common Lisp"[0] is better suited to the purpose. Barski's "Land of Lisp" has also received positive feedback.[1] I'd be interested to see what others consider a suitable general learning path for Lisp. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593272814.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593272814.do
      - linfocito 7y ago
        I think this "A Road to Common Lisp" is a very good introductory guide http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/
      - lispm 7y ago
        The usual starting book is 'Practical Common Lisp' by Peter Seibel. Some advanced stuff then in 'Common Lisp Recipes' by Edi Weitz. Some older advanced stuff with examples: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Cases Studies in Common Lisp (PAIP) by Peter Norvig.
  - 7y ago
AlexMoffat 7y ago
“but we value choice and freedom over rules and processes.” Who could argue with that? It can sound pretty defensive though, like we know we have a bunch of nearly random stuff that few people can really understand and manage but, hey, freedom. Lisp has always been interesting and there’s always one or two companies in any time interval that are successful, and wildly so, using it. It could also be as much skill, great execution and a market.
- Jach 7y ago
  It's easy to argue against, and many companies' higher ups successfully do and thus can mandate a monolanguage policy. For Grammarly, I still see them posting occasionally in the monthly who's-hiring threads for Lisp roles, I think they're doing fine. I wonder if they've since run into more implementation specific issues and have shelled out for one of the proprietary Lisps. SBCL is always improving, though.
  - TurboHaskal 7y ago
    My experience is that mono-language policies (or similar tight, top-down controlling of the language stack) are simply a matter of time. All companies enforce that as they mature. I have been working for two companies that adopted Clojure and Scala early on. They all have, within a period of two to three years, enforced a Java only monoculture with no new projects being written in the aforementioned languages. The reasons were key engineers leaving for greener pastures and experiencing difficulties with staffing: Not being able to find (cheap) experienced developers, or failing to do in house training due to the lack of interest. This might be hard to believe, considering that the average HN user would jump of excitement at the chance to learn something new, but then again, those languages were introduced with the JVM as the main selling point, meaning working mostly with Java developers, who are notorious for their resistance to learn _anything_.
    - jcadam 7y ago
      > mono-language policies (or similar tight, top-down controlling of the language stack) are simply a matter of time. All companies enforce that as they mature. Yea, that would be my cue to leave.
fsloth 7y ago
Is grammarly still using Lisp? How's it going?
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  Want to know as well.
xvilka 7y ago
They still do not provide a per-subscription API for integration, which is plain stupid for 2019. It would be awesome to have it integrated with Vim, Emacs, whatever you like.
- mises 7y ago
  You could probably just crack open the browser extension, prettify it, and send a few sample requests to get the hang of whatever API is used pretty quickly. I doubt it will provide one, as there aren't many users demanding it.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
Grammarly is essentially an opt-in keylogger for your browser. To put it generously, it is hilariously insecure by design. Furthermore, I don't believe that most of their users understand that the plugin "phones home" continuously to function. Hey, at least the developers get to tinker with fun languages while spying on people!
- eukaryote31 7y ago
  How long before Google acquires Grammarly for the data?
- ebiester 7y ago
  While true, I believe the whole intent is to use machine learning on real text to improve the customer's experience. For the customer, this is a feature rather than the bug. It is not how I would prefer to interface with grammar checking, mind you, but I think they have been transparent.
reaperducer 7y ago
Does anyone in the HN crowd know of any other brand-name orgs using Lisp?
- wglb 7y ago
  The lispwork page http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/ http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/ has some that are specific to lispworks. Some also (with possible overlap) at https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/. Allegro Common Lisp success stories: https://franz.com/success/ https://franz.com/success/. ITA (now part of Google) https://www.itasoftware.com/ https://www.itasoftware.com/
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Thanks for the lists. Aside from ITA and Northwestern University, most of those were new to me. I was kinda hoping for some big commonly-known brands. I'm trying to convince my boss to let me learn Lisp on company time.
    - gilesgate 7y ago
      It would seem as too much of a shot in the dark with questionable ROI for a non-technical (and probably even a technical) manager. From their perspective it would seem as the equivalent of introducing an inexperienced programmer into the team (as your Lisp experience will initially be understandably zero), and there wouldn't be anyone in the immediate vicinity to help with peer review or mentoring. Perhaps it would be more effective to learn Lisp on your own through a few hobby projects, and then gradually (and gently) introduce it as a potential solution for work projects? This does depend on your team's structure, though, If anyone here has introduced Lisp into their workplace, I too would love to know their approach, be it successful or not. Although I'd be more interested in proper Lisp (OK, and Scheme) than Clojure, the latter wouldn't hurt either.
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        I think it's worth a try. The company is organized into small teams, and the HR department places a big emphasis on people learning new skills. We have a big catalog of in-house classes that are scheduled and taught every month (or quarter, depending on the complexity) with the purpose of promoting personal and professional growth. While Lisp is not core to what I do, neither is cooking, yet the company gives us classes in that, too. So I think I have a shot.
Exuma 7y ago
This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fast performance wise?
- TurboHaskal 7y ago
  There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity. Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.
    - methehack 7y ago
      Assuming you don't want emacs, so... If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.
      - methehack 7y ago
        Oh I guess my "assuming you don't want emacs, so..." was interpreted as a ding against emacs so I was downvoted... I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there. All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.
beastcoast 7y ago
At Amazon I’ve seen Clojure used successfully as a DSL in a larger service. The scaffolding is Java and the DSL parts are Clojure.
chrisperkins 7y ago
> Being a client-server application, it allows to run its backend on the remote machine and connect to it from your local Emacs (or Vim, if you must, with SLIMV). I have used Slimv and found it quite enjoyable on Vim. Has anyone here tried Vlime? Has anyone tried both? Which one of the two do you recommend?

167 points by wglb 7y ago

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course, C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

msla 7y ago
APL is the ITS of the programming world: Both are immensely powerful and quirky, and were designed by people with a real allergy to typing. It would be nice if there were an Open Source APL which was the equivalent of SBCL in terms of being the default and feature-complete implementation; it would also be nice if APL were elegant as opposed to merely terse.
Throw_Away_4825 7y ago
>(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure What? It gets exposure on the Internet all the time, while seemingly nearly no one uses it in production. Edit: Just look at the end of [1]. They have exactly three examples. Edit 2: They have more example in [2], but it is still pretty little. [1] https://lisp-lang.org/ https://lisp-lang.org/ [2] https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  This is getting downvoted and I don't see why. CL is easily in the top 10 programming languages I see mentioned on HN and it also comes up regularly outside of HN, yet the amount of people actually using it in production seems miniscule.
  - Throw_Away_7435 7y ago
    Because HN is full of Lisp zealots. (Which may be partially because Paul Graham is also a Lisp zealot.) And there is of course also a selection of people who click on certain threads. Many other platforms are similar in that regard, but from HN I would normally except better. (I am the same person as grand-parent with a different account, btw.)
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      HN being one of the few places online where Lisp enthusiasts can find new Lisp-related content and discuss it with other enthusiasts is very different from HN being "full of Lisp zealots" They're still very much in the minority here.
dang 7y ago
Also 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944
jammygit 7y ago
I did not realize common lisp was still in use and was therefore planning on learning Clojure instead. Which is better to learn then?
- eschaton 7y ago
  What made you think it was “no longer in use?” It’s a very big world. Just because something isn’t mentioned regularly in headlines doesn’t mean it’s not out there.
- billsix 7y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
  - gilesgate 7y ago
    "On Lisp" is a good book but perhaps too advanced for an introduction, whereas his "ANSI Common Lisp"[0] is better suited to the purpose. Barski's "Land of Lisp" has also received positive feedback.[1] I'd be interested to see what others consider a suitable general learning path for Lisp. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593272814.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593272814.do
    - linfocito 7y ago
      I think this "A Road to Common Lisp" is a very good introductory guide http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/
    - lispm 7y ago
      The usual starting book is 'Practical Common Lisp' by Peter Seibel. Some advanced stuff then in 'Common Lisp Recipes' by Edi Weitz. Some older advanced stuff with examples: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Cases Studies in Common Lisp (PAIP) by Peter Norvig.
- 7y ago

AlexMoffat 7y ago

“but we value choice and freedom over rules and processes.” Who could argue with that? It can sound pretty defensive though, like we know we have a bunch of nearly random stuff that few people can really understand and manage but, hey, freedom. Lisp has always been interesting and there’s always one or two companies in any time interval that are successful, and wildly so, using it. It could also be as much skill, great execution and a market.

Jach 7y ago
It's easy to argue against, and many companies' higher ups successfully do and thus can mandate a monolanguage policy. For Grammarly, I still see them posting occasionally in the monthly who's-hiring threads for Lisp roles, I think they're doing fine. I wonder if they've since run into more implementation specific issues and have shelled out for one of the proprietary Lisps. SBCL is always improving, though.
- TurboHaskal 7y ago
  My experience is that mono-language policies (or similar tight, top-down controlling of the language stack) are simply a matter of time. All companies enforce that as they mature. I have been working for two companies that adopted Clojure and Scala early on. They all have, within a period of two to three years, enforced a Java only monoculture with no new projects being written in the aforementioned languages. The reasons were key engineers leaving for greener pastures and experiencing difficulties with staffing: Not being able to find (cheap) experienced developers, or failing to do in house training due to the lack of interest. This might be hard to believe, considering that the average HN user would jump of excitement at the chance to learn something new, but then again, those languages were introduced with the JVM as the main selling point, meaning working mostly with Java developers, who are notorious for their resistance to learn _anything_.
  - jcadam 7y ago
    > mono-language policies (or similar tight, top-down controlling of the language stack) are simply a matter of time. All companies enforce that as they mature. Yea, that would be my cue to leave.

fsloth 7y ago

Is grammarly still using Lisp? How's it going?

ngcc_hk 7y ago
Want to know as well.

xvilka 7y ago

They still do not provide a per-subscription API for integration, which is plain stupid for 2019. It would be awesome to have it integrated with Vim, Emacs, whatever you like.

mises 7y ago
You could probably just crack open the browser extension, prettify it, and send a few sample requests to get the hang of whatever API is used pretty quickly. I doubt it will provide one, as there aren't many users demanding it.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

Grammarly is essentially an opt-in keylogger for your browser. To put it generously, it is hilariously insecure by design. Furthermore, I don't believe that most of their users understand that the plugin "phones home" continuously to function. Hey, at least the developers get to tinker with fun languages while spying on people!

eukaryote31 7y ago
How long before Google acquires Grammarly for the data?
ebiester 7y ago
While true, I believe the whole intent is to use machine learning on real text to improve the customer's experience. For the customer, this is a feature rather than the bug. It is not how I would prefer to interface with grammar checking, mind you, but I think they have been transparent.

reaperducer 7y ago

Does anyone in the HN crowd know of any other brand-name orgs using Lisp?

wglb 7y ago
The lispwork page http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/ http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/ has some that are specific to lispworks. Some also (with possible overlap) at https://lisp-lang.org/success/ https://lisp-lang.org/success/. Allegro Common Lisp success stories: https://franz.com/success/ https://franz.com/success/. ITA (now part of Google) https://www.itasoftware.com/ https://www.itasoftware.com/
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Thanks for the lists. Aside from ITA and Northwestern University, most of those were new to me. I was kinda hoping for some big commonly-known brands. I'm trying to convince my boss to let me learn Lisp on company time.
  - gilesgate 7y ago
    It would seem as too much of a shot in the dark with questionable ROI for a non-technical (and probably even a technical) manager. From their perspective it would seem as the equivalent of introducing an inexperienced programmer into the team (as your Lisp experience will initially be understandably zero), and there wouldn't be anyone in the immediate vicinity to help with peer review or mentoring. Perhaps it would be more effective to learn Lisp on your own through a few hobby projects, and then gradually (and gently) introduce it as a potential solution for work projects? This does depend on your team's structure, though, If anyone here has introduced Lisp into their workplace, I too would love to know their approach, be it successful or not. Although I'd be more interested in proper Lisp (OK, and Scheme) than Clojure, the latter wouldn't hurt either.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      I think it's worth a try. The company is organized into small teams, and the HR department places a big emphasis on people learning new skills. We have a big catalog of in-house classes that are scheduled and taught every month (or quarter, depending on the complexity) with the purpose of promoting personal and professional growth. While Lisp is not core to what I do, neither is cooking, yet the company gives us classes in that, too. So I think I have a shot.

Exuma 7y ago

This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fast performance wise?

TurboHaskal 7y ago
There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity. Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.
  - methehack 7y ago
    Assuming you don't want emacs, so... If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.
    - methehack 7y ago
      Oh I guess my "assuming you don't want emacs, so..." was interpreted as a ding against emacs so I was downvoted... I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there. All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.

beastcoast 7y ago

At Amazon I’ve seen Clojure used successfully as a DSL in a larger service. The scaffolding is Java and the DSL parts are Clojure.

chrisperkins 7y ago

> Being a client-server application, it allows to run its backend on the remote machine and connect to it from your local Emacs (or Vim, if you must, with SLIMV). I have used Slimv and found it quite enjoyable on Vim. Has anyone here tried Vlime? Has anyone tried both? Which one of the two do you recommend?